Overnight Open Thread

Hey as bad as things are here - at least we're not living in Britain..or Europe in general. So we have that going for us.

UK Times New Atlas Missing Greenland Ice, Possibly Maldives, Tuvalu, etc.

Actual geographic truth (i.e. reality) must take a back seat to religious faith. If the Church declares Greenland has lost over 15% of its icecap, then it must have - no matter what scientists and satellites say:

Following its controversial decision to produce a map suggesting that Greenland has lost 15 per cent of its ice cover in the last twelve years – a loss rate disputed by most credible scientists: and even, amazingly, the Guardian agrees on this – the Times Comprehensive Atlas Of The World has decided to take its new role as cheerleader for Climate Change alarmism a step further. In its upcoming 14th edition, unconfirmed rumours suggest, it will completely omit Tuvalu, the Maldives and major parts of Bangladesh in order to convey the "emotional truth" about "man made climate change."

More Britain Watch: "Axe murderer who hacked three people to death is allowed out of prison…for a course on chopping down trees"
Sure - seems reasonable. Well except for the bloodthirsty Neanderthal types who insist on always seeing the worst in people and obsessing over 'justice' and stuff.

Ronald Reagan The Pen Pal

On March 12, 1984, President Ronald Reagan was chatting with students at Congress Heights Elementary when he suddenly announced that he had chosen one of them to become his pen pal. The lucky winner was six-year-old Rudy Hines, who was picked because he had proven himself to be a good reader and writer.

The two wrote back and forth with surprising frequency, exchanging hundreds of letters until the end of Reagan’s presidency in 1989. They covered topics you would expect, like reading (“Rudolph, if you get in the habit of reading stories for pleasure you’ll never be lonely”), but also issues typically reserved for the political arena (Reagan lamented not getting to have a personal chat with Mikhail Gorbachev). The Gipper occasionally included some of the doodles for which he later became notorious and sent pictures of himself and the First Lady from their travels, always including a handwritten note on the back.

More Details From The US Government Nuclear Bunker

“Use of alcoholic beverages on the property [is prohibited] except,

(1) In the Balloon Shed Lounge at Mt. Weather and in other locations that the Administrator or the Mt. Weather Executive Director authorizes in writing…”

CONELRAD: Have you ever seen anyone get hammered?
DEEP MUG: Oh, yeah! For several years (until 9/11), FEMA actually held a number of training classes for local and state emergency response personnel out at Mt. Weather. It was a program to take some of the burden off their training center in Emmitsburg, MD. I attended several of these and saw plenty of cops and firemen get pretty hammered. Hell, there's nothing else to do after hours and no place else to really go. The nice thing is that they run a bus service back to the dorms, so you can get as hammered as you like and not worry about driving.
CONELRAD: Do they have Marines serve as bouncers?
DEEP MUG: No bouncers, but if you get out of line at Mt. Weather then you deal with the Mt. Weather security police. They are civilians, but they have NO sense of humor with outsiders, especially these days.

The Early World Wide Web
Web pages from back in the day. You might think this Yahoo page sucks but back when I was surfing the web with Mosaic on a Sun workstation back in 1994, it was cutting edge.

How Pr0n Movies Get Dubbed
Not quite as sexy or fun as one might imagine.

An Actual Working Mind Probe?
By monitoring the visual cortex of people in fMRIs researchers at Berkeley have been able to roughly image what people are visualizing in their mind:

They watched two separate sets of Hollywood movie trailers, while fMRI was used to measure blood flow through the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes visual information. On the computer, the brain was divided into small, three-dimensional cubes known as volumetric pixels, or "voxels."

...The brain activity recorded while subjects viewed the first set of clips was fed into a computer program that learned, second by second, to associate visual patterns in the movie with the corresponding brain activity.
Brain activity evoked by the second set of clips was used to test the movie reconstruction algorithm. This was done by feeding 18 million seconds of random YouTube videos into the computer program so that it could predict the brain activity that each film clip would most likely evoke in each subject.

It's True - Women Can't Park
Well at least not as quick or as well as men can. Don't blame the messenger - blame science:

Sorry ladies, official figures have revealed the truth: we are not very good at parking a car.
Almost a third of all women who failed their driving test last year came unstuck due to parallel parking.

Researchers at the Ruhr University Bochum in Germany asked 65 volunteers to park a £23,000 Audi - and found that women took up to 20 seconds longer than men.
Some women blame the problem on the fact their breasts make it more difficult to turn around while parking.

Weekly AoSHQ Commenter Standings
Top 10 commenters:
1 [483 comments] 'Vic' [67.81 posts/day]
2 [389 comments] 'As If!'
3 [341 comments] 'AllenG (Dedicated Tenther) is tired beyond tired of the trolls'
4 [327 comments] 'Oldsailor's poet'
5 [315 comments] 'Merovign, Dark Lord of Robotic Unicorns'
6 [310 comments] 'willow'
7 [310 comments] 'Soothsayer'
8 [296 comments] 'toby928▒'
9 [295 comments] 'cherry pi, terrorist hostage taking SOB'
10 [290 comments] 'Y-not'

Top 10 sockpuppeteers:
1 [81 names] 'kbdabear' [11.37 unique names/day]
2 [63 names] 'Billy Bob, the guy who drinks in SC'
3 [51 names] 'toby928▒'
4 [45 names] 'Romeo13'
5 [45 names] 'Downscaled Upscale'
6 [29 names] 'Soothsayer'
7 [29 names] 'runningrn'
8 [28 names] 't-bird'
9 [26 names] 'Papa Editor'
10 [25 names] 'Merovign, Dark Lord of Robotic Unicorns'

The group. Yeah.

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posted by Maetenloch at 09:31 PM

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